A reader emailed me yesterday to tell me that while visiting his daughter at a college in North Carolina, he refilled his rental car with gas for $1.39 a gallon.

So I got the idea that something really big is going on here that no one is yet seeing. I processed the possibilities in my snowshoe up to the 10,000-foot level above Lake Tahoe last night.

By the way, the view of the snow covered High Sierras under the moonlight was incredible.

For decades, I have dismissed the hopes of my environmentalist friends that alternatives will soon replace oil (USO) as our principal source of energy.

I have long agreed with the views of my fracking buddies in the Texas Barnet Shale that it will be decades before wind, solar, and biodiesel make any appreciable dent in our energy makeup.

It took 150 years to build our energy infrastructure, and you don’t replace that overnight. The current weakness in oil prices is a simple repeat of a predictable cycle that has continued for a century and a half. In a couple years, Texas tea will be posting triple digits once again.

I always thought that oil had one more super spike left in it. After that, it will fade into history, reduced to limited applications, like making plastics and asphalt, probably sometime in the 2030’s.

The price for a barrel of oil should then vaporize to $5.

But given the price action for energy and all other commodities I’m starting to wonder if this time I’m wrong.

I have watched with utter amazement while Freeport McMoRan (FCX) plunged from $38 to $3. I was gob smacked to see Linn Energy (LINE), admittedly a leveraged play, crater from $32 to 30 cents.

And I was totally befuddled to see gas major Chesapeake Energy (CHK) implode from $65 to $1.

Has the world gone mad?

When the data don’t match your view, it’s time to change your view.

Maybe there won’t be another spike in oil prices. Could its disappearance from the modern industrialized economy have already begun?